"if you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. you have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over" Jerry Lewis
"I don’t believe
in the irreversibility of situations" Deleuze

Note on Citations

The numerical citations refer to page number. The source's text-space (including footnote region) is divided into four equal portions, a, b, c, d. If the citation is found in one such section, then for example it would be cited p.15c. If the cited text lies at a boundary, then it would be for example p.16cd. If it spans from one section to another, it is rendered either for example p.15a.d or p.15a-d. If it goes from a 'd' section and/or arrives at an 'a' section, the letters are omitted: p.15-16.

Previously Bergson illustrated the point that astronomical prediction is not the same as foretelling someone's free actions. He used the example of an evil demon that decrees all motion to go twice as fast. But that means our measuring devices go twice as fast as well. We would notice that the pace of time had a different feel to it. But nothing changes in our calculations, because physics does not deal with the way we experience duration in our consciousness.

Bergson now has us consider what an astronomer does when she foretells lunar eclipses. She compresses all the time between the eclipses, and calculates them all right now. She does not experience the intervening durations between them. So it is as though she sped-up the time, like the evil demon does. The astronomer is only concerned with certain simultaneities, and all the duration between is compressible into an instant. [194-195] Consider when we see a shooting star. It darts quickly across the sky. It seems like its beginning-point and end-point are simultaneous and connected by an extending line. Really it is impossible for something to be in two places at once. But this is much like how astronomers compress the duration between eclipses, and see them all simultaneously in one calculation. So the only way that an astronomer may predict future events is if she makes them phenomena that are currently present to her. She compresses the time between and lives as if she were already there in the future. But then she pretends to have foreseen it by subsequently placing the phenomenon back into its durational place, decompressing the time our consciousness will need to experience before actually witnessing the event. [195c]